Revealing the Universe: COSMOS Collaboration Releases Largest-Ever Map of Galaxies

[fredgrennt]

In a milestone for open science, the COSMOS scientific collaboration has released the most extensive map of the universe to date. Built using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the COSMOS-Web field includes high-resolution imaging and a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies—offering an expansive view that spans almost the entirety of cosmic history. This unprecedented release is already challenging existing theories about the early universe.

“Our aim was to construct a deep-field survey on a scale never achieved before,” said Caitlin Casey, a physics professor at UC Santa Barbara who co-leads the COSMOS-Web project with Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

To illustrate the scale, Casey compared the iconic Hubble Ultra Deep Field—a compact image featuring nearly 10,000 galaxies—with the new COSMOS-Web view. “If the Hubble image fits on a standard sheet of paper, our image would cover a mural over 13 feet by 13 feet at the same depth. It's strikingly vast,” she said.

The composite image reaches back 13.5 billion years—just 300 million years after the Big Bang—and covers roughly 98% of the universe’s timeline. The purpose wasn’t just to observe distant galaxies, but to place them within the larger structure of early cosmic environments during the formation of stars, galaxies, and black holes.

“The universe is structured with dense regions and vast voids,” Casey explained. “We weren’t just looking for the farthest galaxies—we wanted to understand where they existed and how their environments shaped them.”

Before JWST became operational, astronomers expected galaxies within the first 500 million years after the Big Bang to be extremely rare. Based on Hubble data and the physics of cosmic evolution, researchers predicted that only a handful of such galaxies would appear.

“But that’s not what we saw,” said Casey. “With JWST, we’re seeing ten times more galaxies than we predicted at these incredible distances. We’re also detecting supermassive black holes that weren’t even visible with Hubble.” Not only is JWST revealing more objects—it’s revealing new types of galaxies and black holes that defy prior expectations.

While the COSMOS-Web dataset answers long-standing questions, it also introduces new mysteries. “Since JWST started sending data, we’ve wondered if it’s breaking the cosmological model,” Casey said. “The universe seems to have produced far too much light, too quickly. We're seeing objects with billions of solar masses of stars just 400 million years after the Big Bang, and we don’t fully understand how that’s possible.”

By making the full dataset publicly available, the COSMOS collaboration hopes to spark discoveries well beyond their own team. The data could be key to understanding fundamental questions about dark matter, early cosmic physics, and how galaxies evolved over billions of years.

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While the raw data was released shortly after collection, it required specialized tools and expertise to interpret. Over the past two years, the COSMOS team worked to process the data into usable formats, creating catalogs and images that researchers at all levels—even undergraduates—can now explore.

“This project is about democratizing science,” Casey said. “The best discoveries happen when people with different perspectives look at the same dataset. It shouldn’t be limited to a single team or institution.”

The COSMOS-Web field may be the largest and deepest of its kind, but the collaboration is far from finished. The team has already returned to the field, continuing their exploration of the universe’s earliest moments—and inviting the global scientific community to join them.